Stop Digging the Same Hole Deeper

The week unfolds like this:

• Remote jobs from around the world - Monday

• The Hidden Layer - Tuesday

• The Long Game - Wednesday

• Mental Models - Thursday

• One Quote, Unpacked - Friday

• The Real MBA - Saturday

• Weekly Recap - Sunday

The Long Game

The pages that don’t fit

Roughly seven thousand pages of notebooks and loose sheets written by Leonardo da Vinci survive today, scattered across a handful of European libraries.

Here’s the strange part. Open these notebooks looking for painting technique, and you’ll be disappointed. Most of the pages have nothing to do with painting at all. There are studies of how water spirals around a rock. Sketches of the human heart, cut open, labeled in his own reversed handwriting. Designs for a mechanical lion, a diving suit, a multi-barrel weapon that looked centuries ahead of its time. Notes on how birds fly, how rock layers form, how light bends inside a human eye.

He was hired, over and over, as a painter. He spent most of his working life doing almost everything except that.

Nobody made him do this

There was no manager assigning him side projects. He just kept following whatever question was pulling at him that week, and somehow none of it turned out to be wasted. The anatomy sharpened how he painted a hand. The engineering sharpened how he understood weight and structure. Every seemingly unrelated tangent quietly fed the one thing he’s remembered for.

A century of researchers has now tried to figure out if this was a fluke, or if it’s a pattern hiding in plain sight among people who do extraordinary work.

What the Nobel data actually shows

Two researchers at Michigan State University, Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein, spent years studying Nobel laureates going back to 1901, comparing their hobbies against those of ordinary working scientists.

The results were almost embarrassing in how consistent they were. Scientist laureates were about nine times more likely than typical scientists to have real training in crafts like woodworking, metalworking, or fine art. Across the wider laureate pool, the pattern repeated itself in different forms. Some categories of laureates turned out to be over twenty times more likely to perform, sing, or act in their spare time than the average scientist.

These weren’t distracted scientists squeezing in a hobby on weekends. The hobbies seemed to be part of how the science got made. The Root-Bernsteins later wrote that laureates weren’t just tolerating other interests, they were actively hunting for connections between them, almost as a deliberate method.

Which raises an uncomfortable question if you’ve spent your career being told to stay in your lane. What if the lane was never actually the smart move?

A candlemaker’s son proves the same point

For a stretch of history, none of this was strange. Two centuries after Leonardo, a candlemaker’s son named Benjamin Franklin ran away from a printing apprenticeship in Boston with almost no formal schooling behind him.

He built a newspaper. Wrote a wildly popular almanac. Ran electricity experiments that nearly killed him. Invented bifocals and the lightning rod. Ran the postal service across the American colonies, then became the first Postmaster General once independence was declared. Then, almost as a closing act, spent years in France negotiating the alliance and peace that helped secure American independence.

Nobody around him thought this scattered. They thought it was simply what a serious mind did with itself.

Then a pin factory changed everything

In the late 1700s, an economist named Adam Smith wandered into a pin factory and noticed something simple. One worker making a pin start to finish was slow. Ten workers, each repeating one tiny step over and over, were staggeringly fast. Output didn’t just improve, it multiplied.

That single observation, about pins of all things, ended up reshaping how the world thought about skill for the next two centuries. Depth won. Breadth started to look like a lack of focus, or worse, a lack of commitment. Careers became ladders built inside one narrow lane, and climbing meant going deeper, never wider.

For two hundred years, that was correct. It was the right bet, and the people who made it were rewarded for making it.

The part that actually matters

Everyone already knows AI is eating narrow, repeatable work. That’s not the interesting part anymore.

The interesting part is what it does to the bet the pin factory taught everyone to make. For two hundred years, picking one lane and going deep was the safe move, the responsible move, the thing you told your kids to do. That bet is looking shakier now, not because depth stopped mattering, but because depth alone is no longer rare enough to protect anyone.

What still seems to hold value is the connecting itself. Noticing that a marketing plan is about to collide with an operations timeline three weeks out. Tracing a strange dip in customer behavior back through a supply chain wobble to a hiring decision made half a year earlier. That kind of noticing comes from having stood close enough to a business, for long enough, to feel how the pieces move against each other. It’s the same instinct that let Leonardo’s anatomy studies quietly sharpen his paintings.

Nobody can promise this stays a human advantage forever. But it’s the one worth building toward right now.

The shape that’s coming back

This is the kind of range quietly becoming valuable again. Not the shallow kind, where someone knows a little about everything and nothing particularly well. The kind that goes deep in one place and wide enough everywhere else to see how the pieces actually fit together.

People sometimes call this being T-shaped, and the letter is doing real work there. Depth running straight down. Breadth stretching across the top, touching everything else.

How to actually build it

Building this doesn’t require becoming Leonardo. It requires something much smaller, repeated often enough that it compounds.

Borrow an hour a week. Sit in on a product review if you live in finance. Read a marketing brief end to end if you live in engineering. Not to become an expert in someone else’s job, just to get fluent enough to ask one genuinely useful question when it counts.

Take the project nobody wants. The one crossing three departments, making all three a little uncomfortable. It’s messy and mostly thankless, and that’s exactly why it teaches you more about how a business breathes than anything safely inside your own lane ever could.

Collect the patterns nobody else is tracking. The way a hiring slowdown becomes a support ticket problem three months later, almost like clockwork. The way a small pricing change reshapes what a sales team ends up pushing, without anyone officially deciding it should. Nobody teaches this in a training module. You pick it up standing at the edges of rooms you weren’t technically invited into.

The part that doesn’t show up on a review

None of it shows up on next quarter’s numbers. That’s precisely the point, and also the risk. Deep specialists aren’t disappearing, and real expertise will keep being paid well. But as more roles quietly get rebuilt around what a machine can now do alone, the people who end up out navigating everyone else won’t be the ones who dug the single deepest hole.

They’ll be the ones who kept building small, unglamorous bridges between holes, long before anyone told them it was the smart move.

Seven thousand surviving pages, and most of them have nothing to do with the thing Leonardo is famous for. That was never a distraction. It was the method.